Guest blogger: Grownup poetry for YA readers

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I am so jealous of your dinner with Lois Lowry!  I've been meaning to write about her for a long time, and will do so on Friday, when (I hope) I'll be done with portfolio grading, and facing only a large stack of final papers from my other classes.  Until then, here is my most excellent friend and colleague Emily, who teaches the Poetry Workshop class at Stuyvesant and is an accomplished poet in her own right.

Dear Annie,

As someone who has spent the past ten years teaching poetry to teenagers, I want to recommend a handful of writers that young, word-loving people respond strongly to.

Teenagers and poetry are, of course, a fabulous match. When I was in high school, I spent long hours on the front lawn reading Adrienne Rich’s poems out loud with my friend Eve, the grass tickling our legs. My school-issued Norton Anthology of Poetry was permanently cracked open to the short “Women Writers” section, ten pages that eventually led to my career as an English teacher and poet.

Since then, the internet has democratized poetry in wonderful ways. Type “Sarah Kay,” “Alvin Lau,” or “Andrea Gibson” into Youtube and you’ll be instantly thrilled by the spoken word videos you discover. (I’m totally serious: try it!) Page poems, too, are easier than ever to find and connect to. The web site Poets.org has a marvelous search mechanism - “Poems for Every Occasion” - that allows my high school students to search by topics such as “Grief,” “Summer,” “Poems that Teenagers Like,” and even “Sharks” or “Shoes.” That said, there’s something beautiful, almost secretive, about the experience of holding a book of poems, and the right book in the right young hands can be a very big deal.

Mary Oliver is a perennial favorite, one who writes lovely, accessible nature poems. She’s written reams of books, and New and Selected Poems, Volume One and
American Primitive are both favorites of mine. Here’s the entirety of “Wild Geese,” a poem it is easy to imagine a high school writer falling in love with:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

           
100 Selected Poems is a wonderful little edition of poems by e.e.cummings, a writer whose explosive calligrams and expressively-punctuated poems are universally adored by my students.

            A more contemporary writer I love is Lucille Clifton. Her book Blessing the Boats is a great place to start, and her short, evocative, lower-case poems go down easy but linger in the mind. Here’s an excerpt from Four Notes to Clark Kent, titled “note passed to superman,” that is sure to delight young readers:

sweet jesus superman,
if i had seen you
dressed in your blue suit
i would have known you.
maybe that choir boy clark
can stand around
listening to stories
but not you, not with
metropolis to save
and every crook in town
filthy with kryptonite.
lord, man of steel
i understand the cape,
the leggings, the whole
ball of wax.
you can trust me,
there is no planet stranger
than the one i'm from.

The lyrical humor of Billy Collins is easy for writers of all ages to adore, and his web site and fantastic anthology series, Poetry 180, is designed to integrate poetry reading into daily student life. I know both teachers and students will appreciate this representative excerpt from the poem “Did I Miss Anything?” by Tom Wayman:

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

     Everything. I gave an exam worth
     40 percent of the grade for this term
     and assigned some reading due today
     on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
     worth 50 percent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Check out the website to read the rest; it only gets better.

On a totally different note, Sara Teasdale wrote gorgeously sad love poems, many involving Union Square, Coney Island, and other New York landmarks that delight my city students. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay, a poet whose love sonnets I could not get enough of in high school, Teasdale’s work is filled with rhythm and rhyme, so that she feels at once contemporary and deeply classical. Many of Teasdale’s poems are deliciously sad, perfect for a heart-broken high-schooler, but here’s the beginning of a more joyful piece, “Barter”:

LIFE has loveliness to sell,

     All beautiful and splendid things,

Blue waves whitened on a cliff,

     Soaring fire that sways and sings,

And children's faces looking up

Holding wonder like a cup.

 There are, of course, roughly a zillion other poets I could recommend: Nick

Flynn’s Some Ether is raw and potent; Frank O’Hara’s
Lunch Poems radiate casual joy; Yusef Komunyakaa writes gorgeously visceral poems about growing up in the American South; Kimiko Hahn’s intimate, conspiratorial poems in Mosquito & Ant feel like secrets that the coolest girl in school is whispering into your ear. As Billy Collins once wrote,

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

Poetry does, indeed, lead to more poetry, both the reading and the writing of it. These writers are a good place to begin. 

Emily

And love from me, Annie

Grown-up reading: Margaret Atwood

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I have yet to see the Hunger Games movie, but was struck today by a Jezebel post summarizing some of the racist reactions to the casting of Rue as a black girl which were captured on Twitter.  It's a disturbing piece, and also points out how often people who declare themselves to be rabid fans aren't actually reading all that closely.  The Jezebel post quotes the first description of Rue in Suzanne Collins's novel: "She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that's she's very like Prim in size and demeanor...." A second post provides a run-down of the probable or certain skin color of every other major character in The Hunger Games.

Both pieces of commentary posit that Collins includes people of different races in the Hunger Games universe as part of her social criticism: the upper-class people in the Capitol are white and blond; the people in the Districts have a variety of darker skin tones.  It's not an issue I paid a lot of attention to while reading the books, but looking back now, it's clearly there.  (Nice to see, by the way, that the Ender's Game cast is similarly diverse.)

You asked last week about suggestions for contemporary adult authors whose books would make sense on your store's expanded YA shelves.  The first author who leaped to my mind would keep excellent company with the dystopian visions of Suzanne Collins and Orson Scott Card, though her body of work encompasses far more than that one genre.

I'm speaking, of course, of Margaret Atwood: novelist, essayist, poet, short story writer.  I started reading Atwood in high school, and teach her disturbingly prescient novel The Handmaid's Tale every semester in my Women's Voices course.  The Handmaid's Tale takes place in Gilead, a near-future version of the United States in which birth rates have plummeted, and the government has been taken over by religious fundamentalists who relegate all people to specific, rigid social roles.  Women are not allowed to work, read, or have their own money, and are divided up by function: Marthas cook and clean, Wives are the upper-class partners of Commanders, and Handmaids are fertile women who are assigned to Commanders in the hope that they'll produce more babies via what is essentially state-sanctioned rape.  The narrator, Offred, isn't a heroine in the traditional sense.  She's a fairly normal woman who dreams of escape but is kept in her place by fear; she's who most of us might be in the same situation. 

This isn't science fiction, but what Atwood calls "speculative fiction": everything that happens in her books is possible, if you take to a farther extent things people have already done in the world, and done to each other.  Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale in 1986; when I teach it, we read a packet of accounts of women under fundamental Islamic regimes in Afghanistan and Iran, and the parallels are frightening. 

Atwood is a terrific storyteller.  Her prose is gripping and easy to read, and she often structures her novels as a series of small revelations.  You begin in a world where you don't understand the rules; with every chapter, she gives you more information about what happened in the past to bring you there as well as what's about to happen in the future.  This is an author who knows cliffhangers.  Her books feel like pleasure reading, but scratch the surface and there are all kinds of deeper questions at play: about gender relations, about power, about genetic modification and the environment.

I'd happily hand The Handmaid's Tale (or Cat's Eye, or The Robber Bride, or The Blind Assassin, or Oryx and Crake) to a high school student to explore solo; each of them also rewards deep study.  I'd love to see them on your shelves.

Love, Annie

Books, movies & the thought process

Dear Annie,

Ah, the power of beautiful writing.  There's another quote from the New York Times piece you cited on brain science that I especially liked:

...individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television. ....

I've been thinking a fair amount about translating the emotional states of fiction to the screen since seeing The Hunger Games movie Thursday night.  Visually, it felt very true to my mental picture of the book.  Your quote from Natalie Babbitt describing "a lovely greenish glow in the forest, a glow pierced everywhere by tree trunks like fingers thrust into an aquarium full of tinted water" could be about scenes in the movie.

The strongest part of
the book is being able to follow the main character's state of mind and her thought process as her strategy evolves before and during the games.  And given that she rarely talks with other characters about it, that process is really hard to convey in a movie.  It's much easier to show the action, and her reactions to the action.  (Spoiler Alert for the rest of this paragraph)  There's a pivotal scene in a cave where Katniss decides to buy in to the star-crossed lovers strategy.  Reading it, we see that she's  struggling with the decision, and that her feelings about Peeta are extremely mixed.  Her decision is an act of strength.  The movie can't convey her struggle, and instead it shows her responding to direction from Hamish, her coach.  I felt it turned her into a wimp in a crucial scene where she's actually incredibly strong.

Given the blockbuster nature of the film from its inception, in other ways it kept fairly true to the book, though.  But as with the Harry Potter movies, I wonder if someone who hadn't read the book would be able to follow what was happening.  Many parts of The Hunger Games were telescoped into visual flashes in the film.  Some worked (a loaf of bread in the rain, returned to several times), and others did not (was that rice in a briefly glimpsed riot?).

It did much better than some.  Like for instance the disastrous movie of the amazingly wonderful The Golden Compass.  The Next Big Movie in YA books seems to be on the horizon.  The cast for a movie version of Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card -- a sci fi classic -- has just been announced.  The book, first published in a short version in 1977, then expanded to the
novel we now know in 1985, has never made it to the screen.  Most of the characters in the book are between 6 and 11 years old, and Card was apparently opposed to studios' desires to make Ender older.  Some sort of compromise seems to have been reached, with Asa Butterfield (better known as Hugo) in the lead.  He doesn't look like he's six years old, but he's not 16 either.  The cast is stellar, with Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley playing grizzled commanders.  Ender's Game, like The Hunger Games, has so much riveting, often violent action in it, that one worries for the lead character's internal life.  Ender's thought process -- both strategic and emotional -- is the the heart of the book.  The movie's due out in 2013 -- we'll find out then if we'll be able to see all of Ender.

Love,

Deborah

Hunger mania

Dear Annie,

I would like to report that I have my ticket to the opening  midnight show of The Hunger Games movie this Thursday night -- will be going with some of my co-workers.  The movie has been fueling an across-the board popularity for the book that at times reminds me of the Twilight years.

I've been getting lots of questions from parents who are uncomfortable with the idea of their children reading
The Hunger Games and sequels.  This week, a mom whose 11 year-old wants to read the book asked me about it, and before I could say much, her 9 year-old fourth grader gave us a detailed, fairly accurate summary of the book.  She hadn't read it -- but it's so popular that even 9 year-olds know the plot.  The day before, a regular customer had stopped me on the street to ask about its appropriateness for his ten year-old grandson.

My first reaction is to say, this is your child, you need to go by whatever fits your family's standards.  The people who ask about the book are always ones who haven't read it, and the basic description, as I've mentioned before, is one which makes many parents of preteens recoil.  Most of the book takes place in a reality TV show in which the teenage contestants kill each other off: the last one standing is the winner.  But, as you know, it's not a book about how to kill people: it's about repressive government, members of the oppressed class figuring out how to resist that government, strategy, psychological manipulation, integrity -- and hope.

What's the right age to read disturbing books?  What kind of disturbing is something to worry about?  What is a parent worried about -- bad dreams? bad values? bad behavior? warped view of human interaction?  I am writing here as a parent who read both Treasure Island and
The Hobbit to Lizzie when she was Eleanor's age -- yes, five years old. Within the world of books in our household, those choices made sense.   She craved stories of adventure.  Despite the fact The Hobbit contained a scene combining two of Lizzie's biggest fears -- wolves and fire -- she loved the book.  We re-read it with her multiple times.  In my 13 years of bookselling I've probably recommended The Hobbit for a five or six year old only a handful of times. 

Both those books have scary scenes, but not horrifying ones.  The protagonists maintain one's faith in human (or hobbit) nature.  But a book which presents institutionalized cruelty, as in The Hunger Games -- at what age is a child ready to process that?  And once it becomes a part of playground conversation -- does that inoculate kids against its more disturbing elements?  Is it just another action plot, not to be taken too seriously?  I think of The Hunger Games as process-able by most sixth graders. And I think of most fourth graders as not being there yet.  But it's a book about resisting cruelty, about trying to hold onto the important values in life as one is being devalued.  When is one's child ready for those themes?

One of the things I say to those parents who want guidance on The Hunger Games is that it's a good book, one they might want to read themselves -- for their own interest, and to make a more informed judgement than I can offer about their children. 

And pretty soon, I'll be able to add the movie  to those conversations.

Love,

Deborah

Realistic kid behavior in fantasy worlds

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I'm sorry you've been down with a cold this week -- hope you're feeling better!

I've been thinking about YA and chapter books, and the qualities that make a child or teenage protagonist feel realistic, sometimes in uncomfortable ways.  I started on this tack when talking to Jeff earlier this week.  He's currently reading The Hunger Games, which I devoured last year, so that we can go see the movie together next month.  Jeff was struck by a couple of points he felt were unrealistic.

First: in their initial training, the Career Tributes (the teenagers who come from the richer districts and have been training for their whole lives for the Hunger Games) band together and form immediate alliances, while the other Tributes, who were chosen from poorer districts and are far less prepared, don't band together, and remain loners.

Second: this is a world in which everybody has grown up watching the Hunger Games on TV, and seen how the social dynamics play out multiple times.  Would Katniss really be so surprised when Peeta declares his love for her in his live TV interview?  Wouldn't she be prepared for, and understand, the reasoning behind playing up a romantic connection between them?

While I see his point on both counts, neither of these moments made me pause as a reader.  This may partly be that I read more YA literature than my husband does.  But it's more than that: I spend a lot of time with teenagers, and the teenage behavior Suzanne Collins describes feels true to me.  I've been teaching creative writing for 12 years, and have read enough stories of lost friendships and romantic entanglements and entanglements that they're not sure are romantic, but might be, to believe that Katniss would honestly be caught off guard by Peeta, no matter what she'd seen on TV before.

As a teacher who watches cohorts of students cycle through high school, I've become familiar with the tropes of teenage life, with what happens to a class when they hit junior year, and when they then become seniors.    To some extent, my students are aware that the paths they're taking have been trodden before, that the plots of their stories aren't brand new.  But they are brand new to them. 

So yes, I believe that the weaker Tributes wouldn't immediately band together like their own little armed Breakfast Club; in an atmosphere of suspicion, and in their untrained state, they wouldn't make that early move to connect, or even see connection with the other "losers" as a strength.

This week, Eleanor and I are reading The Borrowers, which came in your latest wonderful package.  We're loving it -- such suspense!  Such pleasure in imagining where Borrowers might live in our own home, and what they might be taking!  I hadn't read it in years, and one of the things I'd forgotten was the intensity and discomfort of Arietty's first meeting with the human boy.  She's 14 years old, and a few inches tall; he's 10, and a giant.  When the boy spots her, his first move is to threaten to squash her -- he thinks she's a possibly evil fairy -- and the rest of the interaction isn't much better.  He's threatening and pushy, and she's brave, but thoughtless about revealing information to him.  In short, he acts like a 10-year-old, and she acts like a 14-year-old.

There's something wonderful about reading child protagonists who feel emotionally plausible in this way.  A recognition: yes, I know that kid.  I've been that kid.  That kid speaks to me.

Love, Annie

Chaos Walking

Dear Annie,

Reading with Isabel sounds so delightful -- such a great stage.

I though I'd fast-forward about 15 years to a great YA trilogy which I've just finished.  There are two excellent just-completed YA trilogies floating around these days, both of which I wrote about back in May.  The one which has been getting all the attention these days is the Hunger Games trilogy, of which
Mockingjay is the newly-released conclusion.  That one's still on my bedside table -- I haven't read it yet but would love to hear from our YA fantasy fan readers what they think of it.

The series that's been keeping me from reading Mockingjay is called Chaos Walking; the three books of the trilogy are The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men,  to be released at the end of this month.  The author, Patrick Ness, grew up mostly on the U.S. west coast, but has been living in London for the past decade.  Like the Hunger Games series, it pits teenage protagonists against manipulative controlling political leaders in a dystopian future.  In Chaos Walking, the future is on another planet where people from our planet have gone to create a new society.  The settlers discovered two unexpected facts about the new world: it was inhabited already, by a populace they name The Spackle, and a native virus has made all men's thoughts constantly audible -- but not women's.  The first two books explore how the inequality of privacy -- which is how the humans experience "the Noise" -- affects the society.  The third book brings in both new human settlers unfamiliar with what's been happening among the local humans, and two fascinating Spackle characters.  It turns out that audible thoughts are the Spackle's only -- and very effective -- means of communication, both one-to-one and across the entire planet.

These books start with personal violence, and move on to repression and war -- lots of blowing things up and death, especially in Monsters of Men.  But that's kind of like saying that the Hunger Games books are about a TV reality show where teenagers are forced to kill each other.  Yes, those are the plots.  But the authors use those plots to explore the complexities of human nature in very teenage-friendly ways.  Patrick Ness has an incredible ear for language.  He creates different voices for each of his main characters that submerge the reader in their experience.  Todd, the male protagonist, in battle for the first time:

Is this what war is?
Is this what men want so much?
Is this supposed to make them men?
Death coming at you with a roar and a scream so fast you can't do nothing about it --

and later in the same day, when reinforcements arrive:

"Come!" [the mayor] says to me. "See what it's like to be on the winning side."
And he rides off after the new soldiers.
I ride after him, gun up, but not shooting, just watching and feeling --
Feeling the thrill of it --
Cuz that's it --
That's the nasty, nasty secret of war --
When yer winning --
When yer winning, it's effing thrilling --

I don't feel like I'm doing this excellent series justice.  Suffice it to say that I had to stop reading anything for a few days after I'd finished it because anything I picked up was too much of a disappointing contrast with what I'd just read. So much to talk about in this one..

Love,

Deborah